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The Fear of Learning

"Informed public debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute... Its is nearly impossible to breach this epixtemic divide with good arguments because of the fear that reading will introduce confusion into the reader's mind or bring her into direct contact with the devil... They are sceptical of the academy for fear that intellectual debates may well confuse them about the values they hold. Their refusal to care much about consistency, to base their phrases and making them into lightning rods, however are all finally a refusal to think critically." - Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

One of my biggest problems with christianity in its various forms is how it often ecurages an envrionment which is afraid of learning things which are uncomfortable. Sientific thinking can often be charaterisaed as something that is directly at odds with faith and beleif.

I've found that the process of labeling something as "dangerous" separates yourself from the something you've labeled. Intead of encourageing understanding, it encurages disgust and fear. It keeps us from understanding the subject, often creating straw men of the topics are people at hand. "They are blind to the truth." "They need to be saved from their ignorance." "Sience will never understand the truth of what God is."

It does not help that many of the beliefs of "christianity" are extreamly entangled with the sources of meaning in a persons life. Everytime new information confilicts whith a held belief, a exsitential crisis unfolds. Usually the only way to mitigate this is by reforming the beliefs which were thought to be so imutable. Then we were "simly mistaken about the true form of god's wisdom." and we try again... and again... For me there are too many incogrueties between what I have observed and learned, and what christianity claims the truth of reality to be.

It is a highly self desructive mental environment in which I have no desire to join in again.